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Austen Gregerson column: Jags playing footsie with London

I’ve got good news and bad news for you, Jags fans.

Good news? It looks like the Jaguars won’t be making Los Angeles their new home.

Bad news? London will be, at least partially for the next four years.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and Jaguars owner Shad Khan did their best to spin yesterday’s announcement of one London “home” game a year for the Jags away from becoming a memorial service for Jacksonville’s NFL tenure, but the facsimile smiles plastered across their faces couldn’t hide what’s becoming more and more obvious: Jacksonville’s football team is up for grabs.

But why strip Jacksonville of their franchise? There’s an acronym I refer to whenever something on the surface doesn’t make sense, and boy is this one reliable: CREAM.

For any Wu-Tang Clan fans out there you already know, but for the uninitiated, it stands for Cash Rules Everything Around Me, and the only reason sacrificing a home game every year makes sense is because the money’s in London, not Jacksonville. Anyone with a brain and common understanding of economics knows that pounds spend just as well as dollars do, especially if there are more of them to be had for all controlling parties.

That’s why there was a lockout last year, that’s why ticket prices are as exorbitant as they are, and that’s why no franchise is safe if it doesn’t sell out their stadium. This is a capitalist society, and whenever there’s an opportunity to make more money elsewhere, elsewhere is where we usually go. No doubt that a fan base and their emotions are the casualties, but that’s the price you pay in doing business.

Stop and think as to why Khan would have bought the franchise in the first place. He’s not originally from Jacksonville, didn’t go to school anywhere around here, so what’s the draw?

Shad Khan didn’t spend $770 million to make Jacksonville happy. He spent the money because he wanted to make more of it, like any businessman would, and I have no problem with it. As much as fans are sold on emotion and community with their sports franchises, it’s only in order to fatten the wallets of the team’s owner and the league it operates under and there’s no league that makes money quite like the NFL.

Khan’s smart. He’s not going to move the franchise in his first year of ownership like a bad remake of Major League, but instead slowly start packing up boxes and ship them overseas until there’s only an even-emptier stadium rotting away in downtown.

There’s nothing new about a franchise moving, it’s just the “whole ‘nother continent” thing that makes the Jags committing to London long term so odd and, frankly, insulting to anyone in Jacksonville who wants to keep their team.

Despite whatever circumstance you’d like to point to, there’s a reason why Tampa Bay, Carolina or Tennessee isn’t going overseas: their stadiums sell out. And it’s no crime to not want to spend insane amounts of money to watch an awful football team miss the playoffs for ten of the past twelve seasons, but there’s only so much time the NFL will wait before they find ways to make money elsewhere.

Look what happened to the Cardinals, Ravens, Colts, Raiders and a few other clubs: it wasn’t working out where they were, so they found greener pastures of people still not soured on the team (not yet, at least — Londoners aren’t blind and stupid).

Roger Goodell and Shad Khan have decided that there’s a better way to make money by putting an NFL team in a place that has an entire different sport called football, which by the way they’re pretty fond of, instead of investing into a market already established for enjoying the sport at the high school and collegiate levels.

Best case scenario for any local Jags fans, playing a game in London will add a lucrative revenue stream for the franchise, saving it from almost-certain relocation. Nobody’s saying this is the Jaguar’s trial run before making London its permanent home, after all.

Worst case? Goodell and Khan just haven’t said that yet publicly, your team just found new digs, and those tarps at Everbank just got a whole lot bigger.

Speculation though this may be, the worst thing that can happen to a hypochondriac is to actually get sick, and Goodell and Khan just sneezed over all of Jacksonville.